Paper 2023/1616

DeVoS: Deniable Yet Verifiable Vote Updating

Johannes Mueller, University of Luxembourg
Balazs Pejo, Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Ivan Pryvalov, Brandenburg University of Technology
Abstract

Internet voting systems are supposed to meet the same high standards as traditional paper-based systems when used in real political elections: freedom of choice, universal and equal suffrage, secrecy of the ballot, and independent verifiability of the election result. Although numerous Internet voting systems have been proposed to achieve these challenging goals simultaneously, few come close in reality. We propose a novel publicly verifiable and practically efficient Internet voting system, DeVoS, that advances the state of the art. The main feature of DeVoS is its ability to protect voters' freedom of choice in several dimensions. First, voters in DeVoS can intuitively update their votes in a way that is deniable to observers but verifiable by the voters; in this way voters can secretly overwrite potentially coerced votes. Second, in addition to (basic) vote privacy, DeVoS also guarantees strong participation privacy by end-to-end hiding which voters have submitted ballots and which have not. Finally, DeVoS is fully compatible with Perfectly Private Audit Trail, a state-of-the-art Internet voting protocol with practical everlasting privacy. In combination, DeVoS offers a new way to secure free Internet elections with strong and long-term privacy properties.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. PETS 2024
Keywords
electronic votingeverlasting privacyverifiabilityreceipt-freenessparticipation privacy
Contact author(s)
johannes mueller @ uni lu
pejo @ crysys hu
ivan pryvalov @ b-tu de
History
2023-10-20: approved
2023-10-18: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2023/1616
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/1616,
      author = {Johannes Mueller and Balazs Pejo and Ivan Pryvalov},
      title = {{DeVoS}: Deniable Yet Verifiable Vote Updating},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2023/1616},
      year = {2023},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1616}
}
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